Race Fetish

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"'If any descendant of mine should marry someone colored I'll come back and haunt 'em.' When I was grown I liked to tease her with the knowledge that our blood had been commingled with that of the other race ever since the country began; she would then simply change the subject and complain about how the Civil War was the vengeance of God on a generation of Southern boys who preferred shooting and hunting to going to school."

A character is expressing a sexual attraction to people of a certain group. This group can be as wide as entire races and ethnicities, or as narrow as a local tribe or country. As long as the division is based on geography, ethnicity, or race rather than individual qualities. A classic example is when a white person is attracted to an Asian person for being "exotic." This viewpoint is sometimes built into the narrative itself, especially in older works. In modern works this has a chance of backfiring if the paramour in question vocally disapproves of being objectified in such a manner.

Unfortunately, this tendency does not necessarily make someone antiracist. Indeed, if Bob is disgusted by both other races and women, mistreating Alice, who is not of his race, might be Fetish Fuel for him on a number of disturbing levels. (And if females of the other race are stereotyped as always being lust-inspiring and the man hates them for precisely that reason, that might be Sex Is Evil and I Am Horny.)

Examples

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Anime and Manga

Gate has the main cast stay at a manor where all the maids are different types of Petting Zoo People. Naturally, two of the squad being Otaku to some degree, they couldn't be happier. However, the head maid explains that this wan't due to any enlightened attitudes on the part of the former owner, he just liked the idea of being surrounded by attractive women of multiple species.

Comic Books

The 1967 comic-book story "Cold Steel For a Hot War!" follows the adventures of Captain Hunter, a Green Beret who is searching the jungles of Vietnam for his paratrooper twin brother, who's been shot down in enemy territory. His guide on this quest is a young South Vietnamese woman who may or may not be a VC double agent; Hunter knows this, and yet he cannot repress his feelings of lust for her, repeatedly referring to her (in the inner-monologue narration) as "an Oriental kewpie doll." Finally determined to get some answers, he unexpectedly grabs the woman and demands that she reveal her true motives before pulling her close to kiss him in a relatively nonviolent Slap-Slap-Kiss moment - whereupon two VC guerrillas leap down from a tree to attack them both (the woman is not a traitor after all) and one of them mocks Hunter's foolishness with "Yankee shouldn't mix war with pleasure; it make him very dead!"

In What Dreams May Come, the main character offhandedly remarks that he thinks Asian girls are beautiful, leading his daughter to believe that only Asian girls are beautiful.

Hair has a song called "Black Boys/White Boys" where two groups of girls - one white, one black - sing about how black boys and white boys (respectively) turn them on. The song is so very obviously about heterosexual race fetishism that it becomes very easy to overlook the fact that the song is also about homosexuality (with added Race Fetish) in the army: The male white officers agreeing with the white women that the black boys are delicious like chocolate, and the black officers agreeing with the black women about how kissable the white men are. By making the fetishism a mutual affair, the song makes clear that it's not about racism or sexism. Also, the focus on shallow beauty/sexyness is done in such a way that it sends an anti-racist message: The difference between races is a shallow difference, merely a matter of how you look. And in the end, each of us is lovable and beautiful to someone.

Jungle Fever explores an interracial relationship between a black man and a white woman based on racial sexual fetishes. Another interracial relationship, where the couple sees each other as people first, is offered as a counterpoint.

In Hairspray, Tracy's best friend Penny falls in love with black dancer Seaweed and proudly states that she's never going back to white men.

Penny: "In my Ivory Tower, life was just a Hostess snack, but now I've tasted chocolate, I'm NEVER GOING BACK!"

In The Social Network, Brenda Song plays the Asian girl who jumps at the chance to hook up with Facebook co-creator Eduardo Savarin. Also played with by the characters who discuss why they are attracted to the Asian ladies at Harvard ("They're hot, they're smart, they're not Jewishnote These characters are themselves Jewish, and they can't dance!")

Deconstructed in Get Out where The Armitage Family and the local community's obsession with the athletic superiority of black people and their bodies leads toGrand Theft Me schemes because they believe that they're better than white people at various activities. This only serves to highlight the insanity and racism the family holds.

Literature

In Eighty-Sixed, there is an entire list of Queens, many of them categorized by what ethnic or societal groups they find attractive.

In Tom Sharpe's farce of South Africa in The Apartheid Era, (Riotous Assembly) white policemen consider sexually assaulting black female prisoners is a rare perk in an underpaid job. Kommandant van Heerden himself is not averse - but when he feels the need, he takes it over the border to brothels in Portuguese Mozambique, which isn't breaking any South African racial separation law. Liutnant Verkramp, his resident secret policeman, duly keeps a file on his boss to bring out when the time is right.

In The Sorceress's Orc, many human women are curious about male orcs, and some orcs find humans exotic. Vervain, however, was never attracted to brawny men before she met Riyu.

Live Action TV

Seinfeld, "The Chinese Woman." Jerry dials a wrong number and gets a woman named Donna Chang. He apologizes and hangs up.

Jerry:redialing Should've talked to her; I love Chinese women. Elaine: Isn't that a little racist? Jerry: If I like their race, how can that be racist?

Charlie Sheen's character on Two and a Half Men occasionally displayed a fondness for Asian hookers, though by no means exclusively. (One Imagine Spot depicting his funeral shows mostly white women - and at least one token black one - in the church wearing short black dresses. They spit on his corpse, and the saliva is said to lessen the pain of all the pitchfork stabbings his soul is receiving in Hell.)

Saturday Night Live: In a sketch about a how-to-find-love seminar, Tracy Morgan's character is only into Chinese transsexuals.

In Scrubs, the Dirty Old Man Kelso cheerfully admits he has a thing for Asian women. All of his affairs are with one. It's implied to be due to having served in Vietnam; he even conceived an illegitemate child during the war.

On My Name Is Earl, Joy thought her father would give her hell for her marriage to Darnell, because of the way he approached her dating a black guy in high school. It turns out, the young man was Joy's half-brother; Mr. Darville cheated on his wife multiple times with several different black women. Joy also has at least one other half-sister named Liberty, who is on Earl's list.

On Mad TV, there is a reoccurring skit about an interracial couple who host a call-in show called Inside Looking Out, where they give tips on interracial relationships. The white wife is an unabashed bigot who makes derogatory remarks about her black husband (including stating she'd attacked him before because she thought he was a burglar), while the husband ignores the degradation since he enjoys sleeping with a white woman.

In Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, it would not take a tremendous leap of the imagination to conclude that the Cardassian Gul Dukat has a somewhat creepy fetish for Bajoran women. The creepiness comes from the fact that the Cardassians were occupying Bajor at the time, and that he would have been perfectly able to shoot any of them in the head with no consequences if they turned him down, and that all of them were quite aware of it. Some of his detractors suggest that this was his real fetish, rather than anything special to do with Bajorans. With the exception of his Cardassian wife, who is occasionally mentioned but never shown onscreen, the only women we see him involved with or interested in are Bajoran.

In Star Trek: The Next Generation, Lwaxana Troi is quite open about her preference for human men. That said, she has pursued men of other species in serious relationships, so she's definitely not limited to humans.

There's a possible Fantastic Racism example in the 1983 Sesame Street TV movie Big Bird in China. Big Bird is in Chinatown one day when he catches sight of a painting of a beautiful yellow bird in a shop and is instantly taken with it. The shop's owner tells him that it is Huang Feng, the Chinese phoenix, and that she can only be found after those who seek her come to China and solve four strange riddles that will eventually reveal the Phoenix's location. Immediately, Big Bird feels a strong desire to go to China and tell the Phoenix how much he admires her culture, even though he knows next to nothing about the Chinese and never displayed an interest in them either. It's hard not to reach the conclusion that Big Bird is romantically infatuated with Huang Feng and seeks her for a mate. In any case, when Big Bird finally finds the Phoenix at the end of the movie, he finds that she's not a bird at all, but a Chinese goddess who teaches foreigners about China.

Implied in the Law & Order episode "Good Girl". A young black man is stabbed to death and the defendant claims that she did so after he raped her and tried to assault her again. The investigation reveals that the two had actually been dating. She concocted the story so that her bigoted father wouldn't find out about their relationship—several years ago, he broke her arm because she was dating another black guy.

The Night Of: Attorney John Stone clearly favors black women. His ex-wife is black, and he's trying to start a romantic relationship with a black prostitute he sees regularly. When he mentions "young urban women" in regards to a court case, his legal partner notes how "well-spoken" that term is.

The Rolling Stones' "Some Girls" compares attributes of women from various races and nationalities. Subverted somewhat in that not all of them are deemed positive or attractive. They also wrote the songs "Brown Sugar" (about slave rape) and "Little Negrita".

Referenced in a very dark manner in the Radiohead song "Pearly*," which is about "dirty people who use sex for dirty things."

Stephen Lynch, a white man, has a song called "Vanilla Ice Cream" which is, oddly enough, about his preference for dark-skinned women.

"Oh, I hate vanilla ice cream, I like chocolate instead"

Childish Gambino mentions in several songs that he likes Asian girls (he is black). Most obviously on "Kids":

Finding you is like finding Asians I hate But they say I got a fetish, nah I'm skipping all of it Black or white girls always come with a set of politics

Newspaper Comics

In one The Boondocks storyline, Sara (white woman) is upset when she finds out that her husband Tom (black man) only ever dated other white women. He eventually argues back by listing all of her ex-boyfriends, all of whom have generally black names (one was apparently kicked out of the Nation of Islam for dating her).

Stand Up Comedy

In 2005's Comedians of Comedy, Brian Posehn wished that someday America's relationship with Iraq would be like our current one with Japan. "We find their old people adorable, they have restaurants in the cool part of town, you have a Scott who only fucks Iraqi girls."

Theatre

Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street starts with the song "No Place Like London", where young Anthony sing about the wonders of the world. While the film adaptation and some (maybe most) theater versions have these wonders be mountains and such, there's also a version where it's quite clear that he's singing about the women of the different countries. In all versions, the song is most likely intended to present Anthony as a good guy, not as a racist and sexist. It's just that the more sensual version has aged badly. Which is likely why it didn't stick.

In George C. Wolfe's play The Colored Museum, Miss Roj mentions that gay bar "The Bottomless Pit" does not just cater to black men, there are also "The dinge queens, white men who like their chicken legs dark".

Hair often used the song "Black Boys/White Boys" in the same way as the film version.

The City Elf Origin's Starter Villain is a serial rapist and murderer of elven women, and abducts the City Elf's wedding party (including you if you're female; your fiance if male), with the intention of having his way with all of them.

Zevran, the player's token elven companion, frequently invokes this. He states that the Antivan Crows often recruit elves like him because humans find them attractive, making it easier to lure them into a Honey Trap and invoke Death by Sex. He also frequently lists being "elven and handsome" regarding his desirability as a sex partner. The player character can even gain approval by saying, "There's always a use or two for a handsome elf" as a flirt option.

Interestingly, a Non-Elf Player Character can be played as having this for elven characters. Especially the Human Noble, who can engage in an Optional Sexual Encounter with a bisexual elven woman in the prologue, and romance the bisexual elven companion Zevran, and/or only choose elven prostitutes in Denerim.

Dragon Age 2: A Hawke who shows interest only in elven love interests and/or optional sexual encounters can easily be played as having a thing for elves. ("There's always a use or two for a handsome elf" even returns as a flirt option for this game's handsome male elven companion, Fenris.)

Mass Effect: The Asari, an alien race of female humanoidBlue-Skinned Space Babies are considered highly desirable to all species, from humans to the near asexual and only vaguely humanoid Salarians. Asari are so desirable there are countless strip joints and brothels across space with Asari dancers and prostitutes as their main attraction. It gets a lampshade in the second game when three buddies of different species are watching an Asari dancer, and all of them think it makes perfect sense for their own race to find them attractive but are mystified that the other two do.

In Single Asian Female, it's theoretically impossible for a white man to be attracted to an Asian woman as anything more than a fetish object. Because all white men are creepy jerks, and it's time the Asian women realize that the Asian men deserve to have them. (Yep: While the in-universe narrator was a female Asian, the author was a male Asian - and a quite bitter one at that.)

The title character, bisexual Niels, has the jungle fever, bad. He's in a poly-amorous relationship with a black couple, and his personal security is staffed with blacks as well. Several comics have drawn attention to his various sexual fantasies.

Agent 250, our Manly Gay secret militant agent, seems to have a fetish for Scottish people and culture. His current boyfriend, Agent 300, is a full-blooded Scotsman, and severalcomics have drawn attention to 250's uncontrollable arousal whenever this fact is emphasized. 250's ex-wife Irene even lampshades this in one strip. He is especially attracted to his boyfriend's accent, which comes in two flavors: his more subtle accent, being the product of a rich private school education, and his thicker, natural Glaswegian accent, which he only drops into when he's too drunk to maintain his upper-class-gentleman composure.

In Clerks: The Animated Series, Randall is interested in Asian Chicks, though when through some wacky circumstance he has several Geishas eager to do his bidding, he sends them out for porn featuring Asian women. Like every woman he's dated in the past, they become lesbians by the end of the episode. The previous episode showed the time he accidentally ordered a Japanese mail-order husband by mistake, but the closing montage of that particular story showed that he kind of enjoyed it anyway. Apparently, Asian is more important than chick.

An early episode of The Simpsons had a nightclub singer named Gulliver Dark performing in one of the most popular burlesque houses in Springfield. He sings "I could love a million girls/And every girl a twin./I could love a Chinese girl/An Eskimo - " which is as far as he gets before the act is comedically interrupted (by Homer, of course). After he gets Homer to join him on stage, they sing the rest of the song: "...An Eskimo or Finn./I could dig a Deutschland chick/A girl with golden curls./In fact I think that we could love.../About a million girls!" The showgirls dancing with Gulliver are almost all white (which, this being The Simpsons, means they have yellow skin), but they dress in "ethnic" costumes depicting whichever culture he would sing about.

On American Dad! Bullock admits that he loves fat Asian butts, and he cannot lie. (Also, sluts. Fat Asian sluts are "the trifecta!")

While Malory has many sexual partners of a variety of races, her fantasies seem to focus on black men.

Lana Kane has yet to be seen with anyone other than white men (Cyril and Archer, to be precise). Given her fascination with watching interracial porn, it's likely this is more than just coincidence.

Then there's Archer with his "Mulatto Butts" ringtone.

My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic has a variation in the episode "Simple Ways": Trenderhoof (a unicorn) certainly seems to have something of a (g-rated, of course) fetish for earth ponies, and one of the driving forces of the plot is that he's interested in Applejack because she fits his idea of what earth ponies are supposedly like rather than being interested in her as an individual. Applejack, of course, wants nothing to do with him.

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